The industry has been divided on the choice of a common video codec for some time, namely because the industry standard - H.264 - requires royalty payments to MPEG LA. Today, I am pleased to announce Cisco is making a bold move to take concerns about these payments off the table.

We plan to open-source our H.264 codec, and to provide it as a binary module that can be downloaded for free from the Internet. Cisco will not pass on our MPEG LA licensing costs for this module, and based on the current licensing environment, this will effectively make H.264 free for use in WebRTC.

Cisco will release the code of its H.264 codec under the BSD license, and will also make binaries available for just about every possible platform. Cisco will pay all the licensing costs - over the coming decade, this will cost them a whopping $65 million, illustrating just how expensive H.264 is, and how unrealistic it was to expect it to become a standard without a free implementation being available for everyone to use. It has to be noted that both end users and developers can make use of this.

Mozilla has already announced it will implement this codec into Firefox. All this is great, but it doesn't really address the issue in the long term - the next generation of codecs is coming, and once they arrive, this whole process starts all over again. Will another sugar daddy step up by that time?

For a moment, let's not think that the NSA (and others) like the idea of putting binary blobs in people's systems. Like the poster named "XorEaxEax" wrote:

So now we're going to rely on a binary blob from Cisco for WebRTC? Thanks but no thanks. It's important that WebRTC standarizes on a fully open source and royalty free codec which can be ported and supported everywhere, currently that is vp8/vp9.

Now if MPEGLA were to make h264 royalty free for everyone then that would be another thing entirely.

This announcement is simply MPEGLA's attempt to prevent WebRTC to standarize around VP8/VP9, and Cisco is a h264 patent holder and part of the MPEGLA so this is not an altruistic move by any means.